This book is a selection of Ishikawa’s youthful poems, and a complete imagining into English of his final collection known in English as Grieving Playthings, Sad Toys, and more specifically Suffering Playthings. For over 100 years Ishikawa’s work has been exciting for the modern reader because he was among the very first to bring the depths of his inner turmoil as a human being to life on the page.
All the Blood Involved in Love Poetry by Maya Marshall Haymarket Books, June 2022
In a moment of critical struggle for reproductive justice, Maya Marshall’s haunting debut, All the Blood Involved in Love, meditates on womanhood—with and without motherhood. Traversing familial mythography with an unflinching seriousness, Marshall moves deftly between contemporary politics, the stakes of race and interracial partnership, and the monetary, mental, and physical costs of adopting or birthing a Black child. Maya Marshall, a writer, and editor, is cofounder of underbellymag.com, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. As an educator, Marshall has taught at Northwestern University and Loyola University Chicago. She holds fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Watering Hole, Community of Writers, and Cave Canem.
Never Catch Me Poetry by Darius Simpson Button Poetry, October 2022
Darius Simpson’s debut collection Never Catch Me centers on Black boyhood in the midwest and familial disintegration over time. Simpson pulls back the curtain, exposing the violence enacted against and upon, Black bodies, and yet, still, each poem is saturated in revolution and hope. Never Catch Me is the anthem necessary to organize a community that is committed to a better right now–one that can only be achieved with an intensity and action that goes far beyond the page. Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of the empire and the total liberation of Afrikans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land. Free All Political Prisoners. Signed copies of Never Catch Me are available to order from the publisher’s website.
Rules of Order Fiction by Jeff Vande Zande Montag Press, August 2022
Written in a fever dream during the first five weeks of the 2020 Covid lockdown, Jeff Vande Zande’s newest novel, Rules of Order, tells the story of Harvey Crowe, a community activist, who lives in what could be the last remaining high-rise building on the wrecked planet. Cracks in the ground-floor apartments are appearing exponentially. The building’s tensile strength can’t possibly hold against the load it bears. Crowe works tirelessly to inform tenants on the upper floors that the weight of their possessions could bring the entire building down. Working with ACT (the Anti-Collapse Trust), Crowe encounters obstacles to his message, including indifferent tenants, his self-doubt, hostile security guards, and a co-op board, headed by the corrupt Chairman Burke. Even as Crowe makes meaningful alliances with other influential tenants, he can feel the way they are working against a ticking clock. With time running out, Crowe and his militant colleague Dagmar carry out a desperate plan to save what might be the planet’s last habitable space. The book features a number of boardroom scenes driven by Robert’s Rules of Order, most likely influenced by Vande Zande’s time working as a college English teacher and witnessing such nonsense in real life. Cover art features the painting Mine by art teaching colleague Andrew Reider.
Suspenseful and thought-provoking, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories by Margaret Killjoy is a collection that moves skillfully from humor to horror, passing between science fiction and fantasy to depict human strength and determination against forces both supernatural and all too real. Killjoy’s clear, gripping voice comes through as her cast of queer characters face flesh-eating ghouls, murderous time travelers, post-apocalyptic militias — and other, more mundane threats such as law enforcement, fascists, and nature itself. We might not be here tomorrow, they say, but we’ll fight like hell today.
Reviewer bio: Saga is a writer and editor currently working on a publishing master’s degree on the East Coast. Enjoys sci-fi, video games, worldbuilding, and iced tea. Annual National Novel Writing Month survivor and Radon Journal editor.
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Talk Smack to a Hurricane Poetry by Lynne Jensen Lampe IceFloe Press, September 2022
In her first published poetry collection, Lynne Jensen Lampe deals intimately and specifically with the impact of her mother’s mental illness. The poems in Talk Smack to a Hurricane explore their relationship, a bond bruised by absence and shaped by psychiatry. One sequence, eight erasures sourced from a letter the author’s mother wrote the day after giving birth, tells of a new mother happy with life until an inexplicable mental shift sends her from maternity ward to psych ward—for a year, 2400 miles away from her infant and husband. Using vivid imagery, startling sonics, and odd juxtapositions, Lampe explores a tender and volatile mother-daughter relationship that fed love as well as insecurities. Talk Smack to a Hurricane also includes details of 1883 asylum records, lobotomies, even 1960s fashion icons. In examining family heritage, antisemitism, and the quest for identity, the collection also fights both shame and stigma.
House of the Nine Devils: Selected Bohemian Tales Fiction by Johannes Urzidil Twisted Spoon Press, November 2022
Collected here and translated into English for the first time are some of the most renowned Bohemian stories from Prague native Johannes Urzidil, a long-neglected writer whose short fiction herein spans centuries, from the bygone mythical Prague of alchemists to the late Habsburg metropolis where ethnic tensions seethed under a genteel veneer to the terror-filled days of Nazi occupation and a desperate flight to safety. Bearing his trademark wisdom, empathy, and wit, the writing often blurs the border between reportage, memoir, and fiction, such as an encounter with Gavrilo Princip, wasting away in the Terezín prison after his assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, or a WWI soldier trying to evade military police and thus disrupting a night at Café Arco, a favorite haunt of the Prague Circle that included Brod, Kafka, and Werfel, as well as Urzidil, the group’s youngest member and one of the last links to that symbiotic milieu of Prague German-Jewish artists. Translated from the German by David Burnett.
The Illuminated Burrow: A Sanatorium Journal Fiction by Max Belcher Twisted Spoon Press, November 2022
Max Blecher began writing The Illuminated Burrow in 1937 and continued working on it until his death the following spring, but its full version was only published posthumously in 1971. It was the final “novel” in what can be called a trilogy that includes Adventures in Immediate Irreality and Scarred Hearts, and like those, its imaginative distortion of real experiences is reminiscent of Bruno Schulz as well as the Surrealist autofiction of André Breton and Michel Leiris. Set in the sanatoria where Blecher received treatment for spinal tuberculosis, the ostensible narrator is forced to confront the power and limitations of memory as he attempts to capture the last moments of life as they pass “like ash … through a sieve,” one final effort to reclaim the beauty of days spent straddling the boundary between waking and dreaming, encountering the marvelous both inside and outside the sanatorium’s walls, inside and outside his very body. As his physical powers decline and he becomes permanently bedridden, the narrator’s life migrates to his inner consciousness, an “illuminated burrow” where reality is indistinguishable from fantasy, where the surreal and the mundane seamlessly fuse to enact the fears and fascinations elicited by the vibrant world that is gradually slipping away. Translated from the Romanian by Gabi Reigh with an afterword by Gabriela Glăvan.
Tits on the Moon features a dozen “stage poems,” many of which Dessa performs at her legendary live shows; they’re funny, weird, and occasionally bittersweet. The collection opens with a short essay on craft (and the importance of having a spare poem around for when the power goes out). Published by Rain Taxi Review of Books in association with Doomtree, Tits on the Moon features a stunning cover pressed with gold foil and structurally embossed, designed by Studio on Fire. “Singer, rapper, and writer Dessa has made a career of bucking genres and defying expectations—her résumé as a musician includes performances at Lollapalooza and Glastonbury, co-compositions for 100-voice choir, performances with the Minnesota Orchestra, and top-200 entries on the Billboard charts.”
Conduit Books and Ephemera is open to submissions for their fifth annual Open Book Prize. The winner receives $1,500 and book publication. Any poet writing in English can enter regardless of previous publication record. Do check out their literary magazine Conduit for an idea of what they like. They do charge an entry fee. View their full ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
How to Cut a Woman in Half Poetry by Janis Harrington Able Muse Press, November 2022
Janis Harrington’s How to Cut a Woman in Half is a testament to resiliency in the throes of mounting family tragedies and trials “beyond human comprehension.” This odyssey from loss toward recovery and hope celebrates the boundless love and support between siblings. Using an adapted sonnet form, Harrington has wrought a taut and spellbinding tale in this finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award. Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane, won the Lena M. Shull Book Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tar River Poetry, Journal of the American Medical Association, North Carolina Literary Review, and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. After living in Switzerland for many years, she and her husband returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Murder in Times Square Fiction by William Baer Many Words Press, February 2023
Murder in Times Square, a Deirdre Mystery, initiates a new series by the author of the popular Jack Colt mystery series: When a young woman in a red designer dress falls twenty-five stories from the roof of Times Square One, the well-known New York fashion model known as Deirdre resolves to unravel the mystery. Capable and determined, Deirdre is relentless in her drive to unravel the mystery and find justice for the victim, while protecting those she loves from looming threats. Baer, who has worked in New York City’s fashion district, showcases not only his depth of knowledge of the fashion industry but also of New York City and its landmarks and history. He weaves an intricate, fast-paced, and spellbinding narrative that takes us through New York City, Atlantic City, the Jersey Shore, and the Caribbean. In Murder in Times Square, Baer once again proves he is a master of suspense and intrigue. Many Words Press is an imprint of Able Muse Press.
From a dentist’s office in San Francisco to the caves of the Phong Nha Karst, Tammy Nguyen’s O sounds the depths of personal, mineral, and geopolitical histories of Vietnam. In this many-threaded narrative, a wind that carved mountains whistles through a young girl’s teeth. The electric green of a plastic forest glints off of glazed porcelain. The shape of a bowl becomes the mouth of a cave. What emerges is a story without a center: an anti-allegory that finds its meaning in echoes and refracted light, a book stitched together by the O woven through the work as its visual spine and sonic refrain. Tammy Nguyen is a multimedia artist and writer whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and publishing. Intersecting geopolitical realities with fiction, her practice addresses lesser-known histories through a blend of myth and visual narrative. She is the founder of Passenger Pigeon Press, an independent press that joins the work of scientists, journalists, creative writers, and artists to create politically nuanced and cross-disciplinary projects. Ngueyn is Assistant Professor of Art at Wesleyan University.
Green Burial Poetry by Derek Graf Elixir Press, January 2023
Winner of the Elixir Press 2021 Antivenom Poetry Award, Judge Kirun Kapur had this to say: “Lush and frantic, Green Burial submerges us in a dazzling, apocalyptic pastoral. Here we find a brother’s funeral and a lover’s last drink on the way to rehab as we travel a dreamscape of birds, trash, down-on-their-luck towns, motels and oil derricks. ‘A body falls / through the galaxies / inside an opal,’ the poet writes. And so, we do. In Graf’s hands the end of the world is both grief-stricken and saturated with an exhilarating, hallucinatory zeal.” Derek Graf was born in Tampa, FL. He completed his MFA at Oklahoma State University and his PhD at the University of Kansas. He currently lives in New York City. Green Burial is his first collection.
Madville Publishing currently has two open calls for submissions, The Second Annual Arthur Smith Poetry Prize for a full length poetry collection closes September 30, and the Sticks & Bricks: Stories from the Wrong Side of Town Anthology closes November 30, 2022. Visit our site and view our flyer for more information.
Writing While Parenting Essays by Ben Berman Able Muse Press, March 2023
Ben Berman’s Writing While Parenting explores what it means to pursue one’s creative passions while also raising a family, how having children can make us more vulnerable and imaginative as artists. Given how hectic parenting is, it is possible to balance a career and family let alone find two minutes to pee without someone tugging your leg and asking to watch you make bubbles? How do we possibly find the time or energy to be creative? Spanning five years, these essays range from humorous beginnings (the seven-year-old daughter complaining that she just got kicked in the weenie) to more serious moments (finding two swastikas etched into the slide at the playground, a few blocks down the street from the family home). No matter the genesis, each piece examines the overlaps and dissonance between the creative life and the procreative one. This is a witty, inspired, and illuminating collection for the writer and/or the parent.
While Gabrielle Zevin’s title might initially make readers think of Shakespeare, she sets her story in the 1990s and 2000s video game culture. Her title refers to the ability to start over in games, to continue playing the game until one figures out how to win. Life, though, doesn’t present that same opportunity, and, while lifelong friends Sam and Sadie are still relatively young at the end of the novel, they have come to the clear realization that they are mortal. They are unable to start over during their experiences of loss, which, at times, paralyzes them; their differing approaches to those occurances often leads to the conflict between them. Sam and Sadie recognize each other’s gifts, but they also know each other better than most spouses, so they also see the other’s shortcomings. They thus often seem Shakespearean, star-crossed lovers who come together to create games, then drift apart, often over miscommunication and misunderstandings. Zevin’s novel explores creative friendships and the conflicts that come with them, but, more importantly, she creates characters one wants to spend time with, even when they are at their most frustrating. In other words, she creates characters who behave like humans, for better and worse.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
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How Much? New and Selected Poems Poetry by Jerome Sala NYQ Books, November 2022
How Much? New and Selected Poems by Jerome Sala offers a panoramic view of a poet whose work has often been a cult-pleasure until now. Spanning Sala’s early years as a punk performance poet in Chicago to his career as a copywriter/Creative Director in New York City, these poems offer satiric insights from the “belly of the beast” of commercial and pop culture. Sala’s books of poetry include cult classics such as I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent, The Trip, Raw Deal, Look Slimmer Instantly, Prom Night (a collaboration with artist Tamara Gonzales), The Cheapskates, and Corporations Are People, Too! His poetry and criticism have appeared widely. Before moving to New York City in the 80s, Sala and his spouse, poet Elaine Equi, did numerous readings together, helping to create Chicago’s lively performance poetry scene. He has a PhD in American Studies from New York University.
Girl Flees Circus, the newest release by C. W. Smith, follows nineteen-year-old aviatrix Katie Burke after she crash lands her biplane on the only street in No Name, New Mexico. Her arrival changes her life and the lives of everyone around her. As Katie and her craft need repair, locals take her in and help her, including a schoolteacher who longs for Katie’s friendship, an interracial couple who own the town’s diner, a handsome young mechanic who lives in a teepee, and a shell-shocked veteran of World War I. As her story unfolds, Katie’s mysteries deepen—revealing shocking secrets, a scandalous past, and a future in true peril. Girl Flees Circus takes flight the moment Katie crashes to earth, promising a journey into the lives of a glamorous, redheaded stranger and the people she will change forever.
A homeless man is mysteriously abducted. A journal is left on the edge of a subway platform, filled with stories about a world that doesn’t exist. Not far from here a scientist is murdered in cold blood. The only clues are his burned-down lab. A magnetically propelled motorcycle, and a man walking around New York City with the last living falcon on the planet. Imagine a world where your every thought, your every move, is filtered through The Central Lens Network. Now imagine being a twelve-year-old boy and discovering a special pair of lenses that allow you to access this network undetected. This is exactly what happens to Matthew Glen the day his father is murdered then two years later mysteriously appears back in his life. In a style that echoes back to the Dark Age of Comics when graphic novels were coming into an art form of their own, Myopia merges science fiction with noir steampunk into a thrilling alternative reality, where government and big business use entertainment devices to cover up a new authoritarian landscape.
Essentially Essays by Richard Terrill Holy Cow! Press, October 2022
From Minnesotan author and jazz musician, Richard Terrill’s Essentially is an essay collection that explores what is most essential to him, from the difficult lives of jazz musicians, to trout fishing, to the shifting population and mores of suburbia. “Here’s the thing,” Terrill writes. “There’s always the thing, isn’t there, and most often, not just one?” Terrill asks through this series of wide-ranging, funny, and sometimes gut-punchingly vulnerable essays, What is essential? Maybe trout fishing, the music of Bill Evans, or the whys of dog ownership. Maybe Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, WeChat messaging app, a musician’s early hearing loss, and spying on the neighbors. Or maybe the coming apocalypse, almost getting lost in the woods, trespassing, town clean-up days, and the reason Miles Davis never listened to his own recordings. At times self-effacing and funny, at times outspoken and provocative, Terrill fixes a clear eye on the contradictions in our present moment. “We’re at that point in a journey where you know where you’re going, but you don’t know where you are,” he writes. “The destination should come anytime now.”
In My Secret Place, Max Talley deftly mixes humor with pathos with biting social commentary in seventeen short stories, of legendary jazz musicians meeting for a recording session in 1966, of a painter dealing with the art market crash in downtown Manhattan, of a woman’s surreal walk home in Southern California after another day as a house cleaner, about a mid-’70s bar band achieving one-hit-wonder status, and a middle-aged wife dreaming of her imperious Long Island youth. Talley describes musicians and artists, underdogs and eccentrics; secret heroes of their own lives. People driven by eccentric quests that bewilder friends and family. Apartment managers, stoned teenagers, and pop culture collectors, all trying to live in and make sense of a modern world that may have already left them behind. Talley’s first novel, Yesterday We Forget Tomorrow, debuted in 2014, and his crime thriller, Santa Fe Psychosis, was published by Dark Edge Press in spring 2022. He teaches a writing workshop at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and at Santa Fe Workshops. More at www.maxdevoetalley.com.
Music Gigs Gone Wrong Edited by Richard Peabody and Gerry LaFemina Paycock Press, September 2022
File this one under Bad Luck/Fate/Music Musician: Someone who puts $5000 worth of gear into a $500 car to drive 100 miles to a $50 gig . . . What could possibly go wrong? Edited by Gargoyle Magazine‘s Richard Peabody and writer/musician Gerry LaFemina, Music Gigs Gone Wrong gathers 74 musicians and vocalists to share exactly what can happen, whether the music be punk, rock, folk, jazz, funk, you name it. Contributing writer Michael Gentile, SpliceToday, writes “Music Gigs Gone Wrong is the ultimate ‘I’m with the band’ backstage pass. Here’s a diverse look at a variety of live music disasters told firsthand. Whether it’s a half-empty biker bar or a packed 3,400-seat auditorium— turn on the house lights—you’ll hear about the people, dates and places from big cities to the middle of nowhere. The musicians will sing in your ear about the ordeals they had to go through. Tell me more, I love reading rattling rants and sneering inner thoughts. This grand and wonderful collection appeals to all, especially band members and admirers. Without reservation, swallow Music Gigs Gone Bad hook line and sinker. Go hang out with an enjoyable read; one that draws you in deeper and deeper, guiding visions that beckon you to ride away.”
Belly to the Brutal by Jennifer Givhan sings a corrido of the love between mothers and daughters, confronting the learned complicity with patriarchal violence passed down from generation to generation. Givhan’s poetry edges into the borderlands, touching the realm of chora—humming, screaming, rhythm—transporting the words outside of patriarchal and racist constructs. Drawing from curanderisma and a revived wave of feminist brujería, Givhan creates a healing space for Brown women and mothers. Each poem finds its own form, interweaving beauty and devastation to create a pathway out of the systems that have for too long oppressed women. The poems dwell in the thick language of “motherfear,” “where love grows too / in the shining center of the wound.” This poetry of invocation moves toward a transformation of violence that is ultimately redemptive. Jennifer Givhan (Albuquerque, NM) is an award-winning Mexican-American poet and novelist whose family has ancestral ties to the Indigenous peoples of New Mexico and Texas.
The Tree Stand Stories by Jay Atkinson Livingston Press, October 2022
Jay Atkinson’s The Tree Stand presents short stories of hardscrabble living and crushing blows, shot through with seams of love and hope. Readers will find the settings convincing and mesmerizing; the characters heartwarming and heartbreaking. Along with the title story, the 300-page collection includes “Bergeron Framing & Remodeling,” “Lowell Boulevard,” “High Pine Acres,” “Java Man,” “Ellie’s Diamonds,” and “Hoot.” Atkinson is a professor of writing at Boston University and has an extensive sports background: he has done winter exercises with the US Marines, run with bulls in Pamplona, and played rugby in Belfast during “The Troubles” of the 1980s. He’s written two novels, a story collection, and five narrative nonfiction books, and received the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award Honors in Nonfiction, among other publications and awards. An excerpt and pre-order information can be found Livingston Press.
Good Naked: How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier Revised and Expanded Edition by Joni B. Cole University of New Mexico Press, September 2022
In this revised and updated edition of Good Naked: How to Write More, Write Better, and Be Happier, once again, Joni B. Cole’s humor and wisdom shine through as she debunks long-held misconceptions of how we’re supposed to write, replacing them with advice that works. Feeling overwhelmed? Having trouble getting started or staying motivated? In this edition, Cole offers more stories, strategies, tips on craft, and exercises to serve new and seasoned writers from the first draft to the final edit. Writers will even find help making peace with rejection. Admirers as well as newcomers to Cole’s work appreciate her uniquely cheerful approach, time tested to foster creativity and productivity. Keeping this generous and essential guide close by will provide a jump start to inspiration and a daily reminder of the meaning, humor, and happiness that can be discovered in your own writing life.
The Most Excellent Immigrant Stories by Mark Budman Livingston Press, November 2022
“There is a secret that we immigrants never share with the natives: a good immigrant adapts to a new country, while a most excellent immigrant makes the new country better.” The 22 stories in this newest collection by Mark Budman take readers on a ride from magic realism to hardcore realism to real magic. A certified interpreter of dreams and afflictions searches for treasure buried in a set of antique pillows. An interstellar alien in disguise guards the children at play. A prescription cream stops the dream thieves. A mass killer bares his soul, if he has any. The secret of eternal youth is for sale. And twelve potentially treasure-filled pillows float throughout, befuddling and entrancing their successive owners and seekers.
Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora Edited by Christopher Nelson Green Linden Press, September 2021
Published by the non-profit Green Linden Press, The Essential Voices series intends to bridge English-language readers to cultures misunderstood and under- or misrepresented. It has at its heart the ancient idea that poetry can reveal our shared humanity. The Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora anthology features 130 poets and translators from ten countries, including Garous Abdolmalekian, Kaveh Akbar, Kazim Ali, Reza Baraheni, Kaveh Bassiri, Simin Behbahani, Mark S. Burrows, Athena Farrokhzad, Forugh Farrokhzad, Persis Karim, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, Sara Khalili, Mimi Khalvati, Esmail Khoi, Abbas Kiarostami, Fayre Makeig, Anis Mojgani, Yadollah Royai, Amir Safi, SAID, H.E. Sayeh, Roger Sedarat, Sohrab Sepehri, Ahmad Shamlu, Solmaz Sharif, Niloufar Talebi, Jean Valentine, Stephen Watts, Sholeh Wolpé, Nima Yushij, and many others. Introduced by Kaveh Bassiri.
Winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review Honickman First Book Prize selected by Jericho Brown, Bright Shade is an appreciation of the wild woods, the rolling hills, the Appalachian air, and the little rivers that were the setting of Chelsea Harlan’s upbringing. The poems speak through the liminal space between the body and its relationships to other bodies, and the human relationship with nature—and so climate change is, inevitably, part of this book’s undercurrent of grief. As the author navigates the high highs and the low lows of manic depression, Bright Shade articulates the wonder that accompanies sadness and the sadness that accompanies joy. Chelsea Harlan’s work is humorous, indeed bittersweet (bright / shade), and a little strange in exactly the right way.
Editor’s Note: While we generally prefer new releases, we love to see contemporary takes on older titles and how readers relate to literature over time. Blonde was originally published in 2000, re-released in 2020, and will appear as a Netflix original film in fall 2022.
Marilyn Monroe’s life story is one that most film lovers assume they know well. However, in Blonde (2000), a fictional account of the legendary actress’s life, Joyce Carol Oates takes readers deep beneath the surface of Marilyn into the hidden crevices of her life and her mind. Oates’ words at times ring out like hammer blows. She writes, “Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.”
Blonde leveled me. After reading it, I found myself dizzy with thoughts of the actress – her struggles, her loneliness, her tragic demise. Oates shows that those who encountered Marilyn saw her sadness firsthand and were touched by her. As described by a pharmacy clerk who waited on Ms. Monroe at Schwab’s Drugstore in Hollywood, “She seemed like the most alone person in the world.”
This book shows a hint of the infinite sadness that lies at the center of Ms. Monroe’s eyes. In films, viewers can see the wells of loneliness behind the technicolor. Reading it now in the #MeToo era makes us see the casting couch and all its cruelty for what it is: a maker of stars and a destroyer of lives.
Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates. Harper Collins, 2000/2020.
Reviewer Bio: MG Noles is a hermit, reviewer, history buff, and nature lover.
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The Empty Bowl: Poems of the Holocaust and After Poetry by Judith Sherman University of New Mexico Press, September 2022
In The Empty Bowl: Poems of the Holocaust and After, Holocaust survivor Judith H. Sherman strives to record trauma through art. Her poems, written largely in the words of a fifteen-year-old survivor, provide historical entry into the Holocaust. Put simply, the poems explore the reality of the events experienced by Sherman in her determination to survive—from first leaving home to illegal border crossings, hiding, capture, imprisonment by the Gestapo, the horrors of the Ravensbrück concentration camp, liberation, and, finally, a full life of joys and challenges that came after, including the unyielding intrusions of the past and hopeful celebration of a compassionate future. Forward by Arthur Kleinman. Afterword by Ilana Gelb.
With Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan has chosen a title that seemingly fits her work perfectly, in theme, length, and style. Her novella centers on Bill Furlong, a coal and fuel seller in 1980s Ireland. His life seems quite small, as he goes about his daily routine, working hard delivering and selling coal, logs, and other fuel to customers, and striving to provide for his wife and four daughters. As Christmas approaches, though, he has an encounter that will lead him to make a moral choice, forcing him to confront his privilege and decide what his and his family’s life should be like moving forward. Keegan’s sentences crackle with clarity, presenting exactly what the reader needs to know, and little more. The book is brief—just over a hundred pages—a work readers can digest in one sitting. It seems a small thing, much like Furlong’s life, but it contains so much more, as it grapples with Ireland’s recent history of Magdalene houses. At one point, Furlong thinks, “Why were the things that were closest so often the hardest to see?” That one question sums up decades of dark Irish history, but also so many decisions we fail to make in our lives. Keegan’s novella is a great thing, indeed.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite or kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.
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The winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Prize receives a $10,000 advance and publication by Texas Review Press. This year’s judge is Kimiko Hahn. Poets at any stage of their career are welcome to enter. Unpublished full-length collections need to be submitted by September 30. Stop by the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
The judge of the 2022 George Garrett Fiction Prize is Vi Khi Nao. The contest is open to any writer at any stage of their career. Submit work to Texas Review Press by September 30. Grand prize is $1,000 advance and publication. Learn more by stopping by their ad in the NewPages Classifieds.
NewPages receives many wonderful titles each month to share with our readers. You can read more about some of these titles by clicking on the “New Books” tag under “Popular Blog Topics.” If you are a publisher or author looking to be listed here or featured on our blog and social media, please contact us!
Poetry
Almost Obscene, Raúl Gómez Jattin, CSU Poetry Center Ancestry Unfinished, Yasmin Kloth, Kelsay Books Bright Shade, Chelsea Harlan, Copper Canyon Press The Empty Bowl, Judith H. Sherman, University of New Mexico Press Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, ed. Christopher Nelson, Green Linden Press If Not These Things, Kenneth Chamlee, Kelsay Books In Our Now, Valyntina Grenier, Finishing Line Press Innocence, Micahel Joseph Walsh, CSU Poetry Center The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds, Orlando Ricardo Menes, University of New Mexico Press The Lost Notebook of Zhao Li, J.R. Solonche, Dos Madres My Aunt’s Abortion, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, BlazeVOX My Secret Place, Max Talley, Main Street Rag Publishing Mouth, Sugar, & Smoke, Eric Tran, Diode Editions Of the Florids, Shawn Hoo, Diode Editions A Passable Man, Ralph Culver, Mad Hat Press
Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet Poetry by Michael Mark Rattle Poetry, August 2022
Subscribers to Rattle poetry magazine not only get four issues of the journal each year but are also treated to four chapbooks, one being the Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner. This fall, subscribers are receiving Michael Mark’s winning entry, Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, “a kind of family photo album for the final years of a life.” As dementia progresses in Michael’s mother, each poem is at once a snapshot, a foreshadowing and a memory. And like memories, each is revealing, accurate, and blurry. Sample poems can be read on the Rattle website. Michael Mark has walked the Himalayas, Wales, Portugal, and Spain with his two children. He’s the author of two collections of stories, Toba and Toba at the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum).
Lakȟóta : An Indigenous History The Civilization of the American Indian Series, Volume 281 By Rani-Henrik Andersson and David C. Posthumus The University of Oklahoma Press, November 2022
Lakȟóta : An Indigenous History opens with an origin story, that of White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesanwin) and her gift of the sacred pipe to the Lakȟóta people. Drawing on winter counts, oral traditions and histories, and Lakȟóta letters and speeches, the narrative proceeds through such periods and events as early Lakȟóta-European trading, the creation of the Great Sioux Reservation, Christian missionization, the Plains Indian Wars, the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee (1890), the Indian New Deal, and self-determination, as well as recent challenges like the #NoDAPL movement and management of Covid-19 on reservations. This book centers Lakȟóta experience, as when it shifts the focus of the Battle of Little Bighorn from Custer to fifteen-year-old Black Elk, or puts American Horse at the heart of the negotiations with the Crook Commission, or explains the Lakȟóta agenda in negotiating the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851. The picture that emerges—of continuity and change in Lakȟóta culture from its distant beginnings to issues in our day—is as sweeping and intimate, and as deeply complex, as the lived history it encompasses.
Renowned Korean American modern-dance choreographer Dana Tai Soon Burgess shares his deeply personal hyphenated world and how his multifaceted background drives his prolific art-making in Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly. The memoir traces how his choreographic aesthetic, based on the fluency of dance and the visual arts, was informed by his early years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This insightful journey delves into an artist’s process that is inspired by the intersection of varying cultural perspectives, stories, and experiences. Candid and intelligent, Burgess gives readers the opportunity to experience up close the passion for art and dance that has informed his life.
The Lost Notebook of Zhao Li Poetry by J.R. Solonche Dos Madres Press, September 2022
When J.R. Solonche published The Five Notebooks of Zhao Li in November of 2021, it was called an “intriguing set of philosophical poems…a novel in verse [that] offers a glimpse into the most personal thoughts of a creative thinker.” Filled with more of the wise, witty, profound, silly, thoughtful, thoughtless, koan-like musings, The Lost Notebook of Zhao Li can be considered the sixth and final chapter in the tale of this 75-year-old poet/philosopher, who if asked which one he is, would answer: “Both, but not at the same time.”
A six-hour Amtrak ride from NYC to Syracuse loomed. Searching for something to read, I came across Dana Spiotta’s Wayward, a novel that, surprisingly, takes place in Syracuse. I downloaded the sample on my Kindle, vowing to save the balance of the book for the train if I liked it. But once I started down the rabbit hole with 52-year-old protagonist Sam Raymond, I couldn’t stop. Sam’s having a midlife crisis and impulsively buys a fixer-upper in a sketchy Syracuse neighborhood and announces she’s leaving her husband. Her sixteen-year-old daughter, Ally, sides with dad. But this is not your typical midlife crisis novel! Set just after the 2016 election that upset so many apple carts, we follow Sam as he buys the ramshackle house, joins a radical feminist group, witnesses a cop shoot a young black boy at 3 a.m., does a disastrous night of stand-up at a local comedy club, and grapples with the impending death of her mother from cancer and the daughter who’s no longer speaking to her. Throughout, the history of Syracuse (the city L.M. Baum modeled Oz after!), the backstory about the suffragette icons of the late 1800s, and the etymology of a plethora of SAT words are seamlessly woven into the narrative. There are so many unexpected twists and thought-provoking riffs on getting old and the meaning of life in our wacked, wired world.
Wayward by Dana Spiotta. Penguin Random House, June 2022.
Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
Conduit Books and Ephemera is open to submissions for their fifth annual Open Book Prize. The winner receives $1,500 and book publication. Any poet writing in English can enter regardless of previous publication record. Do check out their literary magazine Conduit for an idea of what they like. They do charge an entry fee. View their full ad in the NewPages Classifieds to learn more.
While the poems in Creature Features draw inspiration from several sources, many center on classic monsters author Noel Sloboda first encountered as a boy while watching the Creature Double Feature television show. In the 1970s and 1980s, this show introduced him to the Mummy, the Wolfman, the Blob — and more. What largely interested Sloboda and what he explores in this collection is how these monsters show us ourselves (or reflect our “features”). Readers may appreciate that there’s also a good deal of Shakespeare in the chapbook, since Sloboda teaches Shakespeare and has spent some time in theatre as a dramaturg. But the author also wanted to lend some of our popular culture nightmares — too often dismissed as disposable or as kitsch — the kind of pedigree they merit. Hence too — in part — the “borrowed authority” with the inclusion of cameos by eminent philosophers. Originally from New England, Noel Sloboda earned his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein became a book. He sat on the board of directors for the Gamut Theatre Group for a decade, while serving as dramaturg for its nationally recognized Shakespeare company. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of English at Penn State York.
Take heart would be novelists who are not twenty-something! One of the best debut novels I’ve read this year is Bonnie Garmin’s Lessons in Chemistry. Garmin is 64 and proof positive that it’s never too late! Set in the early 1960s, back when women were still expected to marry, stay home, and raise the kids, the novel follows heroine chemist Elizabeth Zott as she faces prejudice and discrimination head-on. This is not a rah-rah sisterhood woman’s rights novel, however. It’s a nuanced, very witty, thought-provoking novel on life and all its ups and downs. Elizabeth encounters plenty of both. She meets her soul mate, Nobel-nominated fellow chemist Calvin Evans, at a second-tier lab. When he dies suddenly, Elizabeth is left, (unbeknownst to her at the time) pregnant with their daughter, Mad. Calvin’s death results in Elizabeth’s ungracious firing at the lab after which she serendipitously falls into hosting a TV show called Supper at Six. Stubborn and unwilling to play the happy homemaker, Elizabeth turns the show into a chemistry lesson of sorts, infusing the show with lots of lessons on life. Oh, and perhaps the best character of all: Six-thirty, the family’s very smart and loyal rescue dog!
Reviewer bio: Cindy Dale has published over twenty short stories in literary journals and anthologies. She lives on a barrier beach off the coast of Long Island.
If you are interested in contributing a Guest Post to “What I’m Reading,” please click this link: NewPages.com Reviewer Guidelines.
Salem Revisited Poetry by Charles K. Carter WordTech Editions, November 2021
In Salem Revisited, Charles K. Carter examines homophobic and transphobic violence in the United States. Many of the pieces look as if they have been pulled directly from yesterday’s headlines. Carter brings an awareness to these injustices by shining a harsh spotlight on what haunts many LGBTQ+ community members and their allies. The collection experiments with a wide range of poetic forms including blank verse, free verse, ghazal, and haiku as well as unconventional structures. Charles K. Carter (he/him) is a queer poet from Iowa. He is a volunteer video curator for Button Poetry, and his poems have been featured in several literary journals. Carter is the author of four chapbooks, including Salem Revisited (WordTech Editions). His first full-length collection, Read My Lips (David Robert Books), will be released in fall 2022. Sample poems can be read here.
Unlettered Longings Poetry by Abin Chakraborty ukiyoto, June 2022
Our hearts are not designed to beat to beaten tracks – they have rhythms and quests and seasons of their own which often veer away from established norms and the set motions of everyday existence. Naturally, therefore, we are always entangled in longings — conscious or unconscious which punctuate our days, nights, dreams, writings and much more. The poems in this collection are reflective of such longings, at times foolish, at times desperate, at times mundane, but always authentic. These longings stem from human beings — eternal quests for love, for beauty, for understanding, for solidarity, for recognition. Such quests, of course, are not always fulfilled and the failed and thwarted pursuits bring about their own notes of disillusionment, frustration, anger, self-loathing, and self-deception as well. These poems take all such affects into account while negotiating with the shadows that fall between dreams and reality, between desire and experience, between aspirations and limitations. It is hoped that the reader will find among these lines various echoes of their own myriad experiences which will better illuminate the labyrinthine mazes of our own hearts and souls while securing solace, pleasure, strength, and most importantly, a realm of communion beyond the sutures of the self.
I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend Poetry by Ron Koertge Red Hen Press, October 2022
I Dreamed I Was Emily Dickinson’s Boyfriend easily solidifies Ron Koertge’s reputation as a poet who is very funny and also very serious. In these surprising and delightful poems, a mannequin joins the Me Too movement, a summer job turns into a lesson in class distinctions, and Jane Austen makes a surprise appearance at a mall. Ron Koertge’s uniquely playful imagination is on display in poem after poem. Visit Koretge’s website to learn more about his numerous books of poetry, young adult titles, Academy Award-nominated short film, Negative Space, based on one of his poems, and learn about his famous home – Halloween and Jamie Lee Curtis fans, you’ll want to check that out!
Sans. PRESS, a new indie publisher from Ireland, is looking for short stories for their newest anthology, INTO CHAOS. Open to all genres and writers, we want unexpected stories that show us new layers to reality! Free to submit and selected writers will be offered €150 for stories. View flier or Visit website to learn more.
To Sleep With Bears Poetry by Steve Nickman Word Poetry, April 2022
Steve Nickman’s poems in his newest collection, To Sleep With Bears, are about praise and amazement, as well as connection and the loss of it. They are about food, childhood, hiding, loneliness, small and large animals, and despair. They are about losing courage and regaining it, our capacity for good and evil, and finally about knowing that we won’t live forever. Steve Nickman is an almost-retired child psychiatrist in Brookline, Massachusetts. In 2006 he joined Barbara Helfgott Hyett’s workshop and learned that much of what his patients had to say was poetry. Working with adopted children has given him insight into the feeling of lost connection. Sample poems are available to read here.
Flutter, Kick Poetry by Ann V.Q. Ross Red Hen Press, November 2022
In Flutter, Kick, poet Anna V. Q. Ross plumbs motherhood, migration, childhood, and the cycles of violence and renewal that recur in each. These are poems of math homework and police sirens, where a fox pops out of a fairy tale to dig up the backyard, NPR News spirals the evening carpool into memories of girlhood and trauma, and a city gas leak conjures xenophobic backlash against refugees. In poems of reclamation and warning, Flutter, Kick brings readers to the center of this world—a place where “in those days, we were fast and best, but didn’t know it”—with a compassion learned of anger, memory, and joy.
The strange and sometimes horrific stories in Adam McOmber’s Fantasy Kit could easily draw a comparison to the work of Angela Carter or even the master of lyrical horror, Edgar Allen Poe, but they are also entirely unique. Made up of fairy tales, myths, and traveling through mazes of space and time; each of these stories creeps through the mind long after the last page. Adam McOmber is the author of three novels as well as two collections of short fiction. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals. He teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts where he is also the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.
